10 November 2013 1:04 AM

The miserable behaviour of the police officers in the Plebgate affair, questioned by the Home Affairs Committee, is just the latest example of the strange apology crisis which has this country in its grip: too few of the right sort; too many of the wrong sort.

Nobody is ever straightforwardly sorry for what he has done.

He may be ‘sorry if’ you were upset, or inconvenienced or offended. But listen carefully. This is just a way of telling you to stop being so sensitive. It is not an admission of fault. Watch out for the treacherous little ‘if’, that gives the game away.

He doesn’t regret doing the thing that angered you. But he hasn’t the courage to say so. He just thinks it is tiresome that you are making a fuss about it, and wants to shut you up by faking contrition he doesn’t feel.

Then there is what I call the Railway Apology. There are now millions of these worthless things in circulation, like the old Zimbabwe dollar. They trickle out of station loudspeakers in an unstoppable, computer-generated flow.

They result from some long-ago market research, which showed that passengers thought they were due a bit of penitence for the lateness and unreliability they constantly suffered.

They did, and they do, but what they really wanted was some sort of readiness to put things right in future. It’s no good saying sorry for doing something you intend to repeat almost exactly, within a few hours, and then again and again for as long as you live, or as long as your franchise lasts.

It’s also no good getting a robot to do it for you. Real apologies stick in the throat, involve some shame and humiliation, and are intensely personal.

Perhaps it’s because the Japanese take apologies so seriously that their railways are so much better than ours.

Imagine the directors of some wretched rail company lined up in their suits at a big London terminus, bowing deeply to their customers as they promised to make amends for years of profiteering, cheeseparing and neglect. You can’t? Nor can I.

Some of this is of course the result of Margaret Thatcher’s and John Major’s too little-known legal time bomb, the delayed action decision to allow American-style ambulance-chasing no-win, no-fee lawyers to operate in this country.

The 1990 Courts and Legal Services Act (Section 58) cleared the way, followed in 1995 by the Conditional Fee Agreements Regulations. These, not ‘Human Rights’ or ‘Health and Safety’, are the source of the lawyer-infested culture in which we now dwell, in which a simple, decent and sincere apology has been turned into a dangerous admission of liability.

I am truly sorry about that. But it’s not my fault.

A lovely sign that Dave's in trouble

You can always tell when the Prime Minister’s poll ratings are in trouble, for photographs of Samantha Cameron, looking lovely, will soon appear in all the papers.

And this time she looked lovely in her sari, left. But is this sort of thing really wise?

Our Indian community are a great asset. But so are many others, from whom the Camerons might seek votes.

Will we see Mrs Cameron in a hijab, attending a mosque? And why is it only the womenfolk who go all the way?

How about the premier in a shalwar kameez?

Come to that, when things get really bad, will we discover that our head of government has quietly slipped out of the back entrance in a burqa?

I knew we were well on our way down the plughole when, aged nine, I watched our last battleship, HMS Vanguard, being towed out of Portsmouth to the breakers on a sultry afternoon in August 1960. She ran aground on a mudbank, just to make it worse.

Now poor old Pompey is to lose its shipyards. This is sad for so many reasons. That battered old city has suffered quite enough in the last hundred years. But there’s also this point.

Nobody is supposed to mention it, but defence contracts have always been a quiet way of protecting our own industries and jobs from foreign competition.

Everyone’s supposed to be in favour of free trade, though you can be sure the French, the Germans and the USA look after their own all the time. But we won’t do it. We abide by rules our rivals mock. And so the dole queues lengthen, and we lose the skills to recover.

How funny that we are being accused of spying on the Germans from our hideous new embassy in Berlin’s Wilhelmstrasse.

It reminds me of a much more interesting unsolved case, revealed by that mysterious but authentic writer of spy thrillers Alan Judd. He says a British diplomat was once caught spying on us, on behalf of the European Union.

The wretched traitor’s reward was to have his photograph secretly taken with Jacques Delors, then president of the European Commission.

Australia's losing its past AND its future

I HAVE been spending a few precious days in Australia (my first visit in 20 years) and New Zealand (my first visit).

It is still very moving for a British person to experience these two civilisations, which are rooted in our ideas of justice and liberty.

Would either place be so happy and free had they been colonised instead by China, Japan, France or Germany? I don’t think so. Yet the link is weakening.

Thrilling as it is for me to see Australian warships flying ensigns very similar to our own, and moving as it is to see the Queen’s head on the coins, these things are vestiges.

The British elements are all old, from the age of the floral clock, the war memorial, the silver sixpence, the domed Guildhall and the bowling green. Now they have kilometres and dollars, symbols of globalisation and of US influence. Political correctness has swept away the old tough male Aussie ideal, as I learned in detail when I appeared on the local version of Question Time.

And in Sydney the other day, Rupert Murdoch urged mass immigration on Australia, much as he has supported it here. If he gets his way, Australia will become ‘the world’s most diverse nation’, though Britain under the same policy must be competing for that dubious title.

I hope he doesn’t succeed. If Australia just becomes another money-making multicultural desert of concrete and plastic, its origins in our misty islands forgotten, it will lose much more than it gains.

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03 March 2012 6:31 PM

Here are the most sinister and hopeless words I have ever read: ‘I was told that we now live in a different time and some things are not to be said.’ They should be carved on the tombstone of the Country Formerly Known as Great Britain.

They are as near as we will get to an exact moment at which it became clear our free, happy past is gone for ever.

We grew up in another country, and because we did not guard it, or even see the danger, we have lost it, and our children will live in a censored twilight.

They were spoken – apparently by a police officer – to David Jones, author of the Fireman Sam books. Mr Jones had been detained for speaking words that only a stone-faced totalitarian, wholly devoid of a sense of humour or proportion, could have objected to.

Here are the words: ‘If I was wearing this scarf over my face, I wonder what would happen.’

Here is the context. Mr Jones was passing through the officious farce known as airport security, in which surly persons pretend to watch out for terrorists, and we pretend to take them seriously. A Muslim woman wearing a face veil had gone through the screen ahead of Mr Jones, had not set off the alarm, and had not been stopped.

Mr Jones’s artificial hip (that well-known terrorist weapon) had caused the machine to bleep and so the law-abiding, respectable, 67-year-old former fireman was humiliated with a stupid search which (as always) revealed nothing.

I go through this stuff quite a lot, including an exciting new machine that allows security personnel to view my naked body, and good luck to them. Though its moronic futility fills me with rage, I have learned to suppress it (at one Texas airport, there is a recorded announcement warning that it is an offence to make jokes about security).

I also know, because I read and hear so many stories, just how the Equality and Diversity Inquisition is rapidly turning into a full-on Thought Police in workplaces, schools and public buildings. Sooner or later, they are going to get me too. At this rate, I think it will be sooner.

What Mr Jones was actually doing was to behave like a free man, instead of the cowed subject of a monitored surveillance state in which most of what we think can no longer be said, and every miserable snitch, snoop and sneak has the power to ruin his neighbour’s life.

I’ll carry on defying it for as long as I can, but how long will that be?

Children must come first - no matter how clever you are

No British politician would have dared to say this revolting thing – though it’s what they think – but the Danish premier, Helle Thorning-Schmidt, can.

She thinks it a waste of well-educated women to bring up their own children.

Ms Thorning-Schmidt, daughter-in-law of Neil and Glenys Kinnock, believes paid strangers do a much better job of bringing up children than high-powered persons such as her. And so that is what must happen.

What a fool. When she is a forgotten footnote in a book of Danish history, her children will live on, never having experienced the special and undivided selfless attention that only a parent can give to a child.

Raising the next generation is a far more responsible and important task than being the chief executive of a minor Euro-province which is mainly governed from Brussels anyway. The more educated the parent is, the better she (or he if you like) will do that job.

And then perhaps she might wonder, as she looks back on her life, if all the Cabinet meetings and pictures of herself standing next to Angela Merkel are any compensation for the fact that her children grew up without her.

Have you noticed how the Tories and the Liberal Democrats are trying to pretend they hate each other? Like almost everything in public life these days, it’s a fake.

But both parties are worried that their collaboration has lost them voters. So watch out for a completely made-up row between them, probably over

Lords reform, followed by a Lib Dem ‘walkout’ from the Coalition. Nick Clegg will then go off to be a Euro Commissioner, a post that falls vacant in 2014. Vince Cable will probably take over his party.

Thanks to the creepy Fixed Term Parliament Act, which passed almost in silence, this walkout will not and cannot trigger a General Election. The new law means that the sort of no-confidence vote that brought down Jim Callaghan in 1979 can never happen again, a grave blow to our freedom.

So Mr Cameron will be able to stay at Downing Street at the head of a minority Tory Government.

The two parties will pelt each other with rhetorical mud and slime, the Tories will table all kinds of Right-wing legislation they know will never get through, and David Cameron will buy off his key rebels with ministerial jobs vacated by Liberals.

This pantomime could easily end in another Lib-Con coalition, or even a Lib-Lab coalition that will be exactly the same, but with different teeth and hair. But it will work only if you, the voters, are fooled by it.

So millions of people can’t do simple sums? Of course they can’t. This is because so many snotty teachers, who think proper education is ‘authoritarian’ and ‘learning by rote’, refuse to make children chant their times tables.

I am no mathematician, but got every single one of the test questions right with ease, simply by using my tables.

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30 November 2011 2:53 PM

I have been a trade union member since 1973. I see no reason to stop. One thing above all keeps me in, even though I have many quarrels with the National Union of Journalists. By the way, I should say here that the naïve belief among BNP supporters, that the NUJ in some way requires its members to oppose the BNP, is a baseless fantasy. It has no power to do anything of the kind. The NUJ is, like most unions, largely run by people whose prejudices are left-wing. This is in the nature of unions, especially white-collar ones, for reasons which are obvious if you think about them I am sometimes even attacked in its official journal by other NUJ members who would be shocked to learn that I also belong to it.

But the thing that keeps me in the union is a single unforgettable experience - the day I went to Gdansk, 31 years ago, and met Lech Walesa, then the leader of the great shipyard strike against the Soviet Empire.

I was at the time an industrial correspondent for another newspaper. I had watched, the previous September, the extraordinary scenes at the Trade Union Congress in Brighton, where the leaders of the major British unions had been deeply embarrassed by the Gdansk strike. They knew they ought to support it. But the British Labour movement was in those days so rotten with Communist fellow-travellers and their dupes that it could not bring itself to give clear backing to the Polish workers.

Since then, thanks to ‘Euro-Communism’ and the influence of such things as ‘Marxism Today’, the fellow- travellers have converted themselves into a lobby for EU membership, for ‘equality of outcome’ schemes, for the social and cultural revolution and for the other causes which have in fact made the British left far more powerful and influential than it was when it was trapped by its embarrassingly close association with the worst tyranny in Europe. In these days people, including some members of the labour movement, could see the left for what it was. Now they can’t. I’ll always remember a wonderful moment at a 1970s conference of the old General and Municipal Workers’ Union, when some leftist wiseacre made a speech saying grandiloquently ‘There is no unemployment in the Soviet Union’, and a gruff old geezer then shuffled to the podium and snapped ‘There’s no unemployment in Dartmoor Prison, either’.

I had arrived in Warsaw by train two nights before, the train pulling up in deep snow at a remote suburban station, after an eight-hour journey from Berlin without a scrap of food or drink on board. The promised Polish dining car had disappeared – the country at that time was so broke that there really was very little food available, except for hard currency, and even then pretty limited. We had passed groups of Soviet Army soldiers at the Polish border with East Germany, soon before we clattered across the River Oder. The Polish passengers had anxiously interrogated them (they all spoke Russian) to see if they knew anything about rumours of an invasion. They didn’t. they were just glad not to be in Afghanistan.

Ronald Reagan had just been elected US President (and Michael Foot had just been picked as Labour Leader, though when I saw the announcement of this on Polish TV, Foot looked so gloomy, and his beaten opponent Denis Healey so jovial, that I thought for some time that Foot had lost). Washington was therefore in its lame duck period. And the challenge to Kremlin authority in Gdansk was so outrageous that many believed that Moscow would order in the troops. In the end, Poland invaded itself rather than undergo an actual occupation, setting up an authoritarian regime.

But nobody knew this was coming. Nobody knew what was coming at all, except that it was probably quite frightening. What the strikers did know was that they were up against the same force that had crushed revolts in Berlin in 1953, Budapest in 1956 and Prague in 1968. On each occasion, it had killed, imprisoned and persecuted those who got in its way, sometimes using torture as well. There was at that time no reason to believe that the Politburo had lost its nerve. But when, on that ice-cold grey morning I took the bumpy, rudimentary flight from Warsaw to the north coast, and found my way through the sad, concrete suburbs of the great ‘Free and Hanseatic City’ till I reached the seedy Hotel Morski , which was then Walesa’s headquarters, neither he nor anyone else seemed remotely afraid. The student who volunteered to interpret for me wasn’t afraid. Walesa wasn’t afraid , and obligingly gave me ten solid minutes of unequivocal denunciation of the British union leadership. The people in the shipyard weren’t afraid.

Yet the place was still quite plainly under Communist rule. The slogans extolling the party were still in place (these were never intended to convince anyone, merely to cast in the teeth of non-Communist the fact that they were subjugated). The police and the army were still under the control of the Communist Party, as were the schools and universities, the newspapers and the broadcasters.

Only two things got in the way. One was the Roman Catholic Church, which on its own had been fairly weak, but in concert with the strikers at Gdansk was extraordinarily powerful. The other was the strike weapon, obviously a vital protection against an over-mighty state.

How could I support its use in these circumstances, and not also support the continued freedom to use it (and therefore the unions themselves) in my own home country? It was one of the guarantees of liberty, and. Having seen it in sue, I couldn’t doubt it. Even if it was misused, as it so often was, it was its misuse that was wrong, not the thing itself (one might say something similar about press freedom just now).

So I’ve always held on to my union card, as a deliberate repudiation of the oversimplified view of unions taken by some political conservatives. But I’d add that I think this week’s one-day strike cowardly and wrong. It’s cowardly because it’s willing to wound but afraid to strike – that is, the union leaders and members alike know that their grievance isn’t big enough to justify the use of a real indefinite strike to the end.

So instead they adopt this guerrilla tactic, of messing up other people’s lives every few weeks, in the hope that the public will get so sick of it that they will press the government into giving in.

I also really dislike two arguments used by union spokesmen. One, there’s this pretence that people work in the public sector because of their ethical commitment to the job. No doubt they do, but as they all get paid for it ( I believe public sector pay is now in general higher than private sector wages) they presumably also work for the money. How nice to be paid for being good, or at least for thinking you are good. But in my view most jobs have some sort of positive moral character, if you think about it.

But that leads to the next point. These people claim that David Cameron and George Osborne made them go out on strike. Twaddle. They decided to strike, and they were free not to do so. Whenever anyone grizzles ‘There is no alternative’ or ‘I had no choice’, it invariably means that there is an alternative, or there was a choice but they don’t want you to consider it, or they don’t want to admit it to themselves.

So, if they’re so ethically committed to the state school system, the NHS or whatever it is, how can they bring themselves to shut these things down for a day, forcing their fellow-creatures into inconvenience or worse? I gather that funerals are having to be postponed because of this strike, not to mention non-urgent ( but even so long-desired and important) operations. How can they do that? You can’t, while vigorously kicking someone in the shin, declare ‘I feel your pain and I’m sorry for you’.

As for the trouble caused by closing the schools, it’s enormous. These people’s neighbours should tell them, politely but firmly, that we’re sorry their pensions aren’t what they used to be, but that’s the case for plenty of other people who have no way of forcing taxpayers to make up for the shortfall.

And it’s not good moaning on about bankers and fat cats. Tax, by its nature, mostly comes from those on low and middle incomes. Always has done. Always will.

Wearily I turn again to the ‘war on drugs’. Mr Wooderson seems beguiled by the various grandiose panels, commissions and other gatherings of ill-informed and well-meaning people (Mr Walesa, alas , among them) who have been seduced by the drug lobby into accepting the claim that ‘The War on Drugs has failed’. These people know no more than I do ( and in many cases considerably less than I do) about the nature and history of drug law enforcement. I doubt if most of them, for instance, have even heard of the Woottton report , let alone know what its results were)Why should we listen to them on this topic?

The main blame for this lies in the modern Western media, which are absolutely packed with former ( and current) drug users, who wish to legalise their own misdeeds. They constantly misrepresent the situation, and misinterpret it in a self-serving way. And a number of silly but grand commentators, who love to shock and appear advanced, lend their names to this. Again, they know little of the matter, as they show by their claims of a ‘war’ and their blether about ‘criminalisation’ of cannabis users.

As Mr Heslop so cogently points out, the miseries of Latin America or Afghanistan are the fault of the selfish, affluent wasters in our society who *take* drugs. If they stopped doing so, then the fabulous sums of money which corrupt these places would cease to be available. Yet our supposed ‘war on drugs’ treats the purchase and use of drugs as either a minor misdemeanour, or no crime at all. How can it be so wicked to grow or transport or sell these substances, but excusable to buy and take them? What, if not their evil effects on those who take them, is the reason for the campaign against them in the first place. This blazing anomaly goes completely unnoticed, and so unexamined, by hundreds of newspapers, TV stations etc. The failure to disapprove of, and to interdict consumption is an absurdity. No campaign could work which sought to interdict supply and ignored demand. Yet that is what we do, and then complain it doesn’t work.

Mr Hogarth argues :’ Saying that without consumers there would be no drug trade is pandering to a utopian society that will never exist. There is a demand for drugs, always has been, always will be.’ This is historically inaccurate. Demand for illegal drugs in this country was infinitesimal until the 1960s. The pre-1960 period was hardly an unattainable utopia. Does it occur to him that the cultural and moral collapse of that period, followed by the abandonment of law enforcement, might have affected the amount of drug use in western societies? I have seldom seen the word ‘Utopian’ more wrongly used. Drug abuse in or society is still rare enough to be deterred into a very small corner indeed. Only current users, or people hoping to become rich if drugs are legalised and ‘regulated’ have any interest in putting the opposite case.

I see ‘Bert’ is back. I can’t imagine why. On each attempt to establish that he knows everything, he shows that he doesn’t (I’m still waiting for his alternative explanation for the growing number of fortnightly British rubbish collections, long promised, never delivered. Come on ‘Bert’. What is it if isn’t the Landfill Directive? You’ve had long enough).

Now he wants to argue about how much of Istanbul is in Europe, and how much in Asia. Well, it is quite certain that, measured in simple land area, the European part of the city is bigger than the Asian part ( I am not sure about population). But in general, so what? I was simply responding to a contributor who asserted that Turkey was an Asian country and therefore excluded from European Union membership automatically. The fact that a large part (not necessarily the larger, but almost certainly so) of its biggest city is in Europe would seem to knock that argument on the head. ‘Bert’ only comes here, as I have so often said, to pick nits in a futile and pettifogging way. And I wouldn’t mind if it weren’t for his insufferably vain and grandiose fake name. I have twice visited Istanbul, on both occasions with excellent Turkish guides who know the city well - and I can say that a great deal more than the ‘famous bits’ are on the European side. Enormous, sprawling suburbs which take hours to cross, for one thing. And the main international airport, for another.

By the way, my definition of ‘Europe’ and ‘Asia’ is purely conventional, and certainly not based on a line of longitude. I think it has been accepted for centuries that the Bosphorus, which cuts so majestically through the heart of Istanbul, divides Europe from Asia. The border also lies on the Ural and Caucasus Mountains. But unlike the other continents, Europe and Asia are arbitrarily separated, and might otherwise be considered as a single continent. Perhaps one day they will, when ‘Eurabia’ has come to pass.

I have many times said here and elsewhere that the success of PC arises from its apparent defence of plain good manners. And that conservatives will never defeat this PC as long as they fail to recognise this, and to join sincerely in stamping out such things as the n-word, and the use of derogatory terms for homosexuals. Not that it does me any good with my enemies or (in many cases) my supporters. I get into all kinds of trouble when I say it’s a good thing that the name of Guy Gibson’s dog in ‘The Dambusters’ has been changed, or when I object to golliwogs.

Mr MacDougall, in a thoughtful contribution, asks : ‘What surprises me is that you praise this [Ataturk’s secularisation] in any way, when you rightly attack the less authoritarian but nonetheless successful secularisation of Britain. Islam is not the enemy, only the Islamic extremism of a minority is, and moderate Moslem groups like the AK Party should be our allies. To take one example, the AK does not support the Chador; the President's wife wears a head scarf for modesty, just as many English women did a hundred years ago (and does so with high heels). Why are you so critical of immodest dress in Britain, yet find this so oppressive?’

I’m not sure that I praise Ataturk’s secularisation, exactly. Ataturk was a despot, interesting for having concluded that his country could not survive and prosper if it continued to be ruled by Islam. I think he was right about that, and Turkey’s current prosperity is in the end owed to Ataturk. It will be interesting to see how long it survives the Islamisation now being adopted. But my guess is that Turks, who are increasingly devout, value their faith above prosperity

I simply point out that from a Western point of view, we should be more aware of Turkey’s decision to rejoin the Islamic world and dispense with the Ataturk settlement. From a purely Western point of view, this is going to make our position weaker. And the absurd description of the AK party as ‘mildly Islamist’, constantly parroted by the grand press, is simply and straightforwardly untrue. When the real nature of the Erdogan revolution becomes clear, we will be wholly unprepared for it.

I’m not sure I’ve said all that much about immodest dress in the west. I’m against pornography and gratuitous nudity , and things along those lines – especially when broadcast. And I think the sexualisation of the young, partly through fashion, is a dangerous and damaging trend. But I am not in favour of enveloping the female form in shrouds. Some longstanding readers here will remember the hot water I got into when I made an admittedly flippant remark wishing good luck to women who dressed provocatively. As for the growing Muslim insistence on headscarves, it seems to me to be a very interesting form of psychological warfare. But when I visit Islamic countries where it is widespread, it seems to me that the covering or wrapping of the head and hair have a powerful significance. What is that significance? Is a be-scarfed woman more or less contained? More or less able to express and assert herself among men? I do not think the effect is liberating. Western women who have adopted Islamic garb to gain access to mosques or devout areas of Muslim cities have told me of the powerful transformation wrought by donning the required garments, the feeling of submission and diminution involved, and the loss of individuality as they sink into a crowd of shrouded humps. When the dress takes the form of the burqa or niqab, this is even more so, as the face itself disappears, and in many cases even the hands must be gloved.

This may be voluntary where Islam is weak. But again, I know of Western women venturing into the suburbs of (for example) Basra, and attempting to adopt correct Muslim dress, finding themselves very rudely and abruptly and menacingly told off by local menfolk for allowing even the tiniest bit of flesh to show. In the Iraqi city of Najaf I was warned by my (Christian Arab) interpreter not to approach any women directly, as their menfolk would probably have attacked me had I done so.

I do not think the headscarf and the rest of these garments are all that voluntary. Though I don’t doubt that there is a form of female Muslim devotion much like that which leads Christian women into convents, in which these things are enthusiastically adopted. I also think that if a woman wants to be reasonably safe from molestation in such societies, she is careful to dress with great modesty (the recent very unpleasant treatment of western female reporters in Cairo’s Tahrir Square emphasises that in such societies those who do not cover up are seen by many men as little short of prostitutes).

But is it for protection , or is it a mark of second-class status? Well, , in several Muslim countries that I have visited, women are usually restricted to a special segregated part of the mosque, and are not to be seen inside devout homes, except by other women.

Christianity is different from Islam, and the position of women in Islam is one of the things which makes this especially clear. I am happy to have alliances of convenience with British Muslims against such things as pornography and sex indoctrination (called ‘education’) . But this doesn’t mean the two faiths are the same, or alter my view that Christianity is the better religion. Nor does it alter theirs, that Islam is better.

And as for that, a note on Christianity. Repentance’ is not outward apology, but actual inward change, whose truth is known only to the repentant person and (if He exists) to God. That’s why it is an essentially theistic concept. And as for Mr ‘Bunker’ and his goblins and Father Christmases, these features of his squabbling discourse have a double significance. First they demonstrate his puerile inability to recognise that serious and thoughtful people can and do believe in the existence of God, not to mention his strikingly unjustified belief that he is in some way superior to such people. I am by contrast quite ready to believe that serious people can be atheists (though Mr ‘Bunker’ isn’t one of them). The other feature of it is his complete unwillingness to accept that there is an interesting question to be answered, namely ’Why is there something, rather than nothing?’ and the connected question, almost as important ‘Why is there a universe?’.

Belief in an Almighty Creator offers a possible (not certain, just possible) explanation of this. A belief in Father Christmas, or in Goblins on the end of one’s nose, does not. The two things are not comparable. To equate them ( as Mr ‘Bunker’ has repeatedly done despite numerous pleas of this kind to cease his giggling) is possible only for someone a) utterly incurious about the cosmos and b) wilfully determined not to grasp the difference.

26 November 2011 10:01 PM

At last we know what thieves really think about the people whose lives they ruin. A bitterly funny and honest letter from a burglar to his victim disposes for all time of the notion that there is any point in being nice to crooks.

Remember that this creature has actually been caught and is in the hands of the police. Is he trembling and afraid? Not exactly.

He explains: 'I have been forced to write this letter... To be honest I’m not bothered or sorry about the fact that I burgled your house. Basically it was your fault.'

The victims, he argued, knew they lived in a high-crime area, so they shouldn’t have left a window open.

What is doubly funny about this is that it is almost exactly the same message given to honest citizens by our defeatist police. They, too, are always telling us that if we are robbed, it is our fault for not turning our homes into fortified bunkers. They assume that nobody has any morals or conscience any more, and also that robbers are no longer afraid of the law.

And why should they be afraid? They know the law won’t hurt them, or punish them. The courts yearn to find some excuse to let them go –because otherwise the prisons will burst.

It was while seeking an excuse to let the laughing burglar off that the police told him to write to his victim.

They let him off anyway – no prison, just an ‘electronically monitored curfew’ and 25 hours a week of so-called 'structured activity'. The more syllables these phoney sanctions have, the less they mean. They mean 'let off'.

Letting criminals off is what we are good at. Nearly 30,000 habitual criminals were also let off last year with cautions, after they had returned to crime. The prisons are bursting because hundreds of thousands of people who were once afraid of the law now laugh at it.

Eventually, after 15 or more crimes, the state locks them up for a few weeks in an effort to look tougher than it is. But it is just for show.

This is all quite obvious. Our Government refuses to learn from it because it is the slave of a foolish, Leftist dogma, that crime is a disease caused by hardship. It is not.

It is human evil let loose, and till we return to that view, it will get worse. Like the laughing burglar, I’m not going to show any sympathy for the clowns who have got us into this mess and keep us there.

No doubt you agree with me, in which case why do you keep voting for the clowns? That’s the bit I don’t understand.

* * *

Mr Injustice Bean (pictured right) says that it is not a crime to swear at the police because they hear foul language too often to be offended.

On the same principle, the time will come when burglary, mugging, GBH and even murder will no longer be crimes, because we have all got used to them happening all the time.

Well, when that day comes, we won’t need Mr Bean any more.

Doesn't 'modesty' apply to footwear?

Perhaps because I travel a lot in Muslim countries, I am fascinated by Islam’s growing need to swathe the female form in textiles. It has spread greatly in the past 20 years.

Officially it is all about modesty. But the key words in the Koran are rather vague, and don’t seem to me to prescribe hijabs, niquabs, jilbabs or burkas.

I was once told by a North African Muslim activist in Antwerp that the hijab headscarf had been adopted in Europe mainly as propaganda, to wind up the Western world. It’s been very successful if so, making several European countries try to ban it, which free societies can’t really do.

But the founder of modern secular Turkey, Mustafa Kemal, thought Islamic ideas about women would hold back his country. So he really did ban the hijab, especially in public buildings. And now that the fiercely and militantly Islamist AK party has taken over the government of that vital country, in a silent but earthshaking revolution, it is a very big issue indeed.

Turkey’s president, Abdullah Gul, is a fervent Islamist, as is his wife Hayrunissa. She is so keen to sport a hijab that in 1988 she was refused admission to Ankara University for insisting on wearing one, and came close to taking the issue to the European Court of Human Rights.

This week she appeared at Buckingham Palace (pictured) swathed in her headscarf and also balancing on astonishingly high heels. Are such heels Islamic? It seems unlikely.

But the combination of nun-like headgear and sexy footwear increased my suspicion that this is more about politics than religion.

Gilded lives... and squalid secrets

Whose home life is being described here? Is it perhaps some dismal tower-block existence in post-industrial Northern England?

A mother who 'yearns to try her sleight-of-hand' at shoplifting, though she reckons it is not 'age-appropriate' for her now... 'so, off you go, children, but remember, only steal from large conglomerates'.

A mother who 'doesn’t hide her occasional joint-smoking' from her teenage son. A son who says 'my mother smokes more pot than I do'. A mother who held her child’s 15th birthday party in her home at which beer and wine were provided – and vodka smuggled in.

The vodka wasn’t removed once it was discovered. The mother recalls that amid the vomiting and the girls being walked in the night air to keep them conscious... 'out of my peripheral vision I witnessed [my son] smoke a joint, [and] swig vodka from the bottle'.

A son who says 'I was 13 when, with my older half-brother, I smoked my first joint'. A mother who says she has given dope to her mother and father, aged 78 and 82. A son who was present when this happened.

No, these are not from some sad social worker’s report into misery and deprivation in the lower depths of our society. They are taken from two freely given interviews with gilded, fortunate people.

One, of all places, was in The Lady magazine, with Polly Samson, wife of millionaire Pink Floyd star David Gilmour. The other appeared in The Guardian, given jointly by Ms Samson and her son, Charlie Gilmour.

You may recall that Charlie recently emerged from prison after swinging on the Cenotaph in a drug-induced frenzy. I have to say I feel more sorry for him than I did before.

I didn’t want to return to this subject. But when I found these interviews, I wondered – is this sort of upbringing what Britain’s well-off chattering classes now regard as normal? I fear it may well be.

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11 April 2011 4:31 PM

French plans to outlaw the wearing of Islamic face-veils will not achieve anything of importance, and are, for the most part, a crude interference with private choice. I suspect that, after a few weeks during which Muslim militants will create deliberate confrontations, the law will be as rigorously enforced as (say) Britain's rather more important law against using a hand-held mobile phone while driving.

The real problem for France and for most other European countries is that they have permitted large-scale immigration from Muslim countries, and under the rules of multiculturalism they have from the start permitted and even encouraged Muslims to live differently from other citizens. the choice has been made. It's gone too far to stop with gestures of this kind. A ban on Islamic dress, by failing, will only serve to emphasise that these countries are well on the way to an accommodation with Islam. All that remains in doubt is how generous that accommodation will be. I have long said that it is quite possible that much of Europe will become formally Islamic in the years to come. The only real question is how long this will take.

The eradication of Christianity from laws, customs, ceremonies, education and culture in general will make this process much easier than it would have been when these countries were actively Christian. I only hope Professor Dawkins is pleased as amplified calls of 'Allahu Akhbar' waver and echo from the Islamicised towers of redundant Victorian churches in the damp and misty air of North Oxford.

Islam is in general becoming more militant about the veiling of women. Only 30 years ago in the Middle East, most urban women went uncovered in cities such as Cairo or Beirut. Now the hijab, or headscarf, while not a legal obligation, is fast becoming universal. Not wearing it has become a statement, just as wearing it was a statement 30 years ago.

Conformity makes life simpler, so most women conform, and it is virtually impossible to find out what they really think about it any more.

Something similar is happening in Central Asia, where Islam was once driven back by the combined force of Kemal Ataturk and Josef Stalin. Veiling is common in the formerly Soviet republics of Uzbekistan, Kazakhstan, and Tadzhikistan. On a recent visit to Turkey, I noted the growing popularity of Islamic dress among urban women. Or is popularity the wrong word? Prevalence, certainly. The popularity is (I suspect) largely among increasingly Islamist menfolk, though I spoke to some young women who had enthusiastically adopted the hijab at some cost to their careers - wearing it is still, I think, forbidden on the campuses of state universities.

By the way, can we try to get the terminology right in any discussion? There's a tendency for people to assume that all Islamic female headgear is described by the word 'burka' (spelled in several different ways). It is not. The hijab - by far the most common - is a headscarf, usually worn to cover all or most of the hair. The Niqab, almost invariably black, is a mask which covers the whole face apart from a narrow slit for the eyes, worn with a scarf which totally covers the hair. The burka is a garment which shrouds the entire body,. Rather than having a slit for the eyes, it has a cloth grid, through which the eyes cannot be seen. There is also a garment, whose name I do not know, worn by the women of Kashgar, in which the face is entirely covered (not even the fine grid of the burka) so that the women look alarmingly as if they have risen from their graves and are walking the streets in shrouds.

For myself, I don't mind all that much. The first time I saw a woman in full niqab scurrying through the security barriers at the BBC TV Centre in London, I thought it ridiculous and muttered something along the lines of 'Oh, for heaven's sake!'. Though the place was busy and noisy, and I had spoken softly, she (with the amazing sensitivity which people sometimes have to scrutiny when they are themselves a bit nervous) turned and gave me a long, surprisingly expressive look, of mingled annoyance, resentment and scorn. It is amazing how much expression can be conveyed by the muscles around the eyes.

Since then, I've come to think that - providing they lift their veils for full facial inspection on the rare occasions where facial identification is desirable and necessary - they're welcome to wear what they want. In fact, I suspect that Islamic militants would be most displeased if we just ignored this aggressive separatism, and behaved as if it wasn't going on.

But if you don't want an Islamised society, rather than messing around with clothing laws, here's another thought. May I suggest that you work out what your answer to that fierce, simple and easily-understood religion's consoling precepts is. Yes, we currently have bigger guns and better bombing planes, but so what? We are richer. But will we always be? We can get drunk (and we do). Is this a big advantage, either morally or materially? Likewise, the use of our women's freedom to dress as they like. Faced with the choice of beholding a tattooed ladette displaying a muffin top glowing with fake tan, or a Muslim woman in full niqab, most of us would at least hesitate. I put this mildly.

I have more than a suspicion that our existing society continues to survive without revolt or collapse only because it gets a little richer each year. Once that prospect is gone, and the succeeding decades instead bring shrinking pay packets, higher prices and fewer jobs, where will minds hungry for solace and comfort and hope turn to? Thanks to half a century of active secularism, most people in this country are quite clueless about Christianity and wouldn't know where to begin with it. If a religious revival comes (and we're about due for one) who is best placed to take advantage of it?

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09 April 2011 10:45 PM

The phrase ‘social mobility’ has been twisted round by the elite to mean the opposite of what it once did. In their mouths it signifies ‘crude discrimination against those who seek to advance themselves or their children through effort and talent’.

This is a wicked perversion. Here is what it really means: when this was still a free country, you could climb thanks to your talent and hard work. My favourite example is that of Lord Denning, one of six children of a Hampshire draper who became the greatest judge of our time.

One of his brothers, Reginald, helped plan the D-Day landings and became a general. Another, Norman, became an admiral, and Director of Naval Intelligence. The boys’ mother, Clara, must have been quite a person, but Whitchurch National School and Andover Grammar School should take a little credit too.

In their austere, disciplined, orderly classrooms, children from poor homes could learn real knowledge, and gain the habits of work and diligence that might take them to the very summit of our once-open society. If they had talent, it would be nurtured and encouraged.

If they were studious, they would not be bullied for it, but rewarded.

Faced with ferocious exams, which it was possible to fail, they learned that real life wasn’t easy and had to be tackled with application and determination. That’s how a proper middle class, confident, strong and open to talent, is made.

But those who now shape and direct our society long ago destroyed these places. Believing it was kinder, they scrapped the discipline, the order and the rigour, and turned the exams into feeble jokes.

When the truth became clear, they refused to change their minds but carried on as before. The three Denning brothers would rapidly have had their hopes crushed by today’s state school system.

If three such boys – or girls – now exist, we will never hear of them, except perhaps in the courts, because the corruption of the best is the worst of all, and a bright and energetic mind, when all the doors of ambition and hope are slammed in its face, can easily turn to wrongdoing.

I cannot express on paper just how angry this makes me, or how angry it ought to make you. The nearest I can come to it is this – to say to Nicholas Clegg, David Cameron and Edward Miliband that they are all three of them cruel, contemptible and stupid, enemies of promise, enemies of their country, and enemies of the poor.

And in each case the crime is especially serious because of their own immense personal privilege. I hope all their political careers end in abject, howling failure, preferably with them being laughed out of office, the only punishment they are likely to understand.

Because all three of them, and their wretched parties, have set their faces against the honest self-improvement that is the mark of a free society. Instead, they gargle the discredited slogans of equality – an equality they don’t even believe in for themselves or their children.

You will have to ask yourselves why the leaders of supposedly democratic parties in a supposedly free society have endorsed a policy that is more or less identical to that of the Eastern European communists of the Forties.

More importantly, you will have to ask yourselves why on earth you have continued to vote for them, knowing what they are and what they stand for.

Were the varnished toes a hit, Baroness?

The sight of a barefoot Baroness Warsi, in full hijab, accompanying Mr Cameron (in his socks) to a mosque in Islamabad prompted a number of irreverent questions to which I do not know the answers.

They go (in no particular order): Would the mullahs have approved of the Baroness’s daring choice of toenail polish? Why doesn’t she wear a headscarf on public occasions in Britain?

Was Mr Cameron trying to buy votes among British Pakistanis when he announced a huge £650 million dollop of aid to the Islamic Republic? Do Pakistani leaders visit Westminster Abbey when they come to London?

Since then, I have been consumed with curiosity about those other pictures of Mr and Mrs Cameron on their cheapo Ryanair holiday to Spain.

Does the Prime Minister really need to go to cashpoints? And when will the real holiday be?

Daft Dave’s ‘leasehold’ Empire

The Prime Minister was right when he pointed out that most of the major crises in the world have their roots in the British Empire. It’s unquestionably true. Afghanistan’s stupid border? Our fault.

The endless Indo-Pakistan tension? Our fault. The mess in the Middle East? Our fault. The destruction of democracy in Iran? Our fault.

I am myself a child of Empire, born in what was then Malta GC when the mighty Mediterranean Fleet still filled the Grand Harbour at Valletta. And, having seen one or two other empires in action, I still say ours was the best.

What’s more, it seems to me that in this cruel world you either have an empire or become part of somebody else’s, and I know which I prefer.

The problems I list above were mostly not caused by the Empire itself. They followed its sudden, rapid collapse after the disastrous surrender of Singapore in 1942, one of the worst of the many failures and retreats that took place under the over-praised leadership of Winston Churchill.

People keep saying that we made a good job of withdrawing from Empire.

It’s just not true. The scuttles from India and Palestine were needlessly bloody and crude. They left grave, unsolved problems.

If you take over someone else’s country, you have to stay there for good, and commit yourself absolutely.

The current fashion for leasehold colonialism, where you barge in with bombs and soldiers and then clear off, is guaranteed to cause more difficulties than it solves.

That said, I have never seen such an adventure crumble into chaos and failure as quickly as Mr Cameron’s ill-considered Libyan affair. Bombing our own side?

Well, I never. But how on earth do we get out now we’re in? So much for the brilliance of Etonians, eh?

****************************I don't think the Tory leadership really want us to vote NO in the AV referendum, do you? They’re not trying. All the more reason to vote NO, then.

****************************Almost every year, the presentation of the winners’ prize on the final of University Challenge is ruined by some celeb, or Jeremy Paxman himself, saying that the show proves there’s no ‘dumbing down’ in British education. This year, it was the turn of the ever-so-slightly over-praised historian Antony Beevor.

Actually the programme is gripping evidence that education is going down the plughole, as undergraduates goggle blankly when asked to identify easy quotations from major classics of English literature. It’s not just that they don’t know the answers.

It’s that they don’t know they don’t know. Meanwhile, the supposedly all-knowing Mr Paxman still can’t cope with German words or place names. Halle doesn’t rhyme with ballet.

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27 July 2010 8:59 AM

In reply to the contributor whose response this was to my view that we couldn't tell people what to wear, the answer is simple. A law which says that nakedness should be concealed by a garment (or that going naked in a public place is illegal, I'm not sure of the law) is quite different from a law which defines exactly what that garment may or may not be.

In one case, the issue is that public nakedness is assumed by the law to be wrong on grounds of decency. This deals with the widely-accepted and in many cases instinctively-felt view that some parts of the human body are private and should remain so. It does not, so far as I know, specify how the covering should be done, but that it should be done. As so often, two things which appear to be similar or the same are actually quite different.

In the other the proposed burka ban is saying what garment may or may not be worn. Nor does it concern the private parts of the body, a concept which varies from culture to culture but in no case includes the human face as such (or Muslim men would be covering their faces too, see below). Presumably any modern anti-burka law would have to ban men and women from wearing it, to avoid anti-discrimination legislation.

There are other differences. A law which requires concealment of what are generally known as 'private parts' is different in type from a law compelling the display of the female face (though I do wonder what this debate would be like if Muslim males were required to wear face-coverings, or believed they were, and began to do so in large numbers).

The fact remains that a free state, such as ours has been, would be in serious danger of violating its own principles if it sought to legislate in this way. There's the other point, that such a law would be very hard to enforce. Use your imagination.

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24 July 2010 10:48 PM

For those of you who say I never have a good word for David Cameron, here’s one. He’s pretty much right about 1940, even if it was by accident.

When a politician is accused of committing a ‘gaffe’, it almost always means he has told the truth.

And 1940 was in fact the year that Britain became America’s very junior partner, a sad role we have followed ever since. I know, I know, the USA didn’t enter the war against Germany until 1941 (and then only when Hitler declared war on them).

But Franklin Roosevelt took great advantage of our des­perate position in 1940. As the Germans advanced through France in early summer that year, he offered one of the most unfair bargains in the history of diplomacy – 50 worn-out, ancient destroyers in return for nine rent-free US military bases in British colonies.

He had already insisted on hard cash for war supplies, which rapidly depleted Britain’s gold and currency res­erves. And Britain only finished paying for ‘lend-lease’ wartime aid – down to the uttermost ­farthing, plus interest charged for late payment – on December 29, 2006.

Post-war loans and Marshall Aid came at the cost of pledges to relinquish what remained of the empire, not least the bits we had just fought so hard to get back from the Japanese, and to open up colonial markets to U.S. competition – plus unrelenting pressure to join the European Union, which still goes on.

These weren’t the acts of besotted friends, but of a hard, wise, calculating politician who wanted the best for his own country, not for ours.

It seems to me that we have sentimentalised this for far too long. I don’t blame the Americans for using our weakness and desperation to displace us as Top Nation. This is how great powers behave (and how we used to behave ourselves when we still could). And I think that, when China becomes the supreme world power, many people who now sneer at America will yearn for the happy days when the globe was run from Washington.

But every time I hear the words ‘Special Relationship’, I feel faintly sick. And I yearn for a British Prime Minister with the self-confidence of Charles de Gaulle, who could tell the Americans to get lost from time to time, especially when they want us to join in their crazier military ventures.

They would respect us more, and treat us better, if we weren’t constantly snuffling round their shoes with our tongues lolling out, like a pack of servile spaniels.

Try it Ms Spelman, and see just how empowered you feel

If you'd asked me which Liberal Conservative Minister was the most likely to say that the burka was ‘empowering’, I’d have guessed Theresa May, the Lib-Tories’ answer to Harriet Harman. But given the deep, increasingly undeniable uselessness of the whole party, it’s no surprise that it was in fact Caroline Spelman. I suggest they both take to wearing them, anyway, for a year or two and then tell us how ‘empowered’ they feel.

I’ve visited many countries where Islam insists that women are covered in various ways, and I’m quite sure that many of them hate it. I’m equally sure that a significant number do it out of conviction and piety. I’ve talked to one such, in her home, in Iran.

But I’m equally bothered by the memory of a woman in an English backstreet, veiled to the eyes and unaware that I was looking at her. As she arrived at her front door, she whipped the black cloth away from her face with an urgent, hungry gesture that said –more eloquently than any words – how glad she wasto be rid of it.

It seems to me that the law really cannot do anything about this. In a free country, people should wear what they want unless – as in banks or at immigration desks – there’s a strong practical reason to compel them to show their faces.

People who don’t like the sight of Militant Islam on our streets should worry first about changing the lax immigration policies that hamper the integration of the Muslim citizens who are already here. They should also wonder if our own Godless, drink-soaked, vomit-splashed, skirts-up-round-the-armpits culture doesn’t help persuade some of our Muslim citizens to hide behind the veil.

‘Outraged’ U.S. has been wooing Libya for years

Can those who fuss about the release of alleged Pan-Am bomber Abdelbaset Al Megrahi at least mention the fact there is no evidence that he committed this crime?

Also that the U.S. government has been sucking up to Libya for years, in gratitude to Colonel Gaddafi for getting rid of ‘weapons of mass destruction’

that he never in fact had.

Anyone who actually knows what is going on in the world must find the current dim, sheep-like credulity of most of the Western media almost unbearable.

Drop Brussels in the black bin, Eric

Eric Pickles, the enjoyable and traditionally built Minister who once complained to me that a harsh diet had only succeeded in making his feet less fat, should likewise own up to the truth about weeklybin collections.

This is that the EU’s Landfill Directive (devised to deal with problems in Holland and Belgium which we don’t share) is the real problem.

We face gigantic Euro-fines if we continue to dump our garbage in landfill sites, thanks to a law we didn’t make and can’t change. Hence the pressure to recycle and the near-disappearance of proper weekly collections.

I actually suspect Mr Pickles has enough sense to see that this stupid restriction (and thousands of others like it) will only end when this country leaves the EU. I dare him to say so.

******************************************We seem to have rather suspiciously fierce laws on ‘religiously aggravated’ crime these days. In which case, how was it that a Muslim man who sprayed ‘Islam will dominate the world’ on a war memorial in Burton-upon-Trent was not charged under those laws? I’ve no idea. But an interesting new pamphlet from the Civitas think tank – A New Inquisition – reveals that there is a body called the National Black Crown Prosecution Association. This (of course) has general official backing.How wide is its influence? Should it have any?

******************************************On Tuesday, the BBC’s John Humphrys utterly destroyed William Hague with a new technique. As the Foreign Secretary sought to defend our futile military presence in Afghanistan, Humphrys coolly fusilladed him with the facts – which argue for immediate withdrawal. Mr Hague at least had the wit to remain calm as he sank slowly beneath the waves of truth and logic. But men are still dying almost daily because he won’t face reality.

******************************************Since it stopped having a leader, the Labour Party has risen sharply in the polls. The people now competing for the job are dreary and uninteresting. And the media (which once sucked up to Labour) has now decided to suck up to the Coalition until about 2023, so whoever gets the job can expect to have slime ladled over his head till he gives up in despair. So may I suggest that Labour saves time, money, trouble and human grief by not having a leader at all until 2020 or thereabouts?

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04 July 2009 10:35 PM

Let’s think of all the things the Conservative Party might want to apologise for.

Privatising the railways, joining the Common Market, loading the police with paperwork, devastating the Armed Forces with cuts, introducing the GCSE, flattening half of British industry by accident in the early Eighties, failing to oppose the Iraq War, sacking the brave miners of Nottinghamshire and Derbyshire who defied Arthur Scargill’s bullying mobs...I could go on.

But no. What it has said sorry for is something called ‘Section 28’, which stopped local authorities from promoting homosexuality in schools.

Pride: Boy George and friends at the Gay Pride parade

David Cameron journeyed specially to a ‘Gay Pride’ event to kowtow to the sexual revolution and simper: ‘We got it wrong. It was an emotional issue. I hope you can forgive us.’

Forgive them for what? Section 28 resulted from a fuss over the appearance of books aimed at children, intended to spread the view that single-sex couples could bring upchildren without any disadvantage to those children.

I still remember the titles: ‘Jenny Lives With Eric And Martin’ and ‘Heather Has Two Mommies’.

Less than 25 years ago, only revolutionaries such as Ken Livingstone endorsed this sort of thing.

Mainstream politicians and newspapers alike were as doubtful about it as most people still are in their private thoughts.

Nowadays, opinion formers and MPs have been scared into conformity, and the unhappy majority have learned to keep quiet about their concerns, for fear of the Thought Police.

This supposedly wicked law was little more than an expression of opinion by Parliament.

Nobody was ever prosecuted under its provisions. Try as they may, the homosexual liberation movement have never produced evidence of any martyrdoms resulting from it.

What they still hate about it is that it was the last stand of those in British politics who were not cowed into silence or acquiescence by the sexual revolution.

They want to make sure that the victory of self-indulgence – which is what this is really all about – is irreversible.

That way, there is no chance that the stable married family, or the society it supported, can ever come back.

And guess who is helping them? Why, the party that is supposed to stand for conservatism.

How far into the swamp will the Tories allow Mr Cameron to lead them before they realise what he is?

Heroes like this deserve a real cause to fight for

Waste: Lt Col Thorneloe died in an unsafe Viking

The death of a senior commander in Afghanistan has at least produced a bit more coverage of the needless casualties in this futile, wrong, doomed war.

The Taliban murder of Lieutenant-Colonel Rupert Thorneloe, without doubt a fine soldier in a great tradition, is being compared with the loss of the last senior officer to die in battle, Colonel ‘H’ Jones.

But mark the differences. Colonel Jones died in battle in a war fought for British interests, with clear, achievable aims.

Rupert Thorneloe, just as brave, was assassinated, with no real chance to hit back, in a war with no clear aims.

And he was killed because he was travelling in a Viking vehicle which is known to be unsafe, ought never to have been used in Afghanistan in the first place and will be withdrawn from there next year precisely because it is unsafe. It should be withdrawn now.

I do not understand why the British people tolerate the political incompetence and vanity that leads to such tragedies. I do not understand why the Opposition has not demanded a proper debate about it.

Are we supposed to be mollified by the issue of a small medal for the relatives of the bereaved – a medal that may have to be manufactured in Germany because Brussels law compels us to tender for the job throughout the EU?

Macho gestures in Afghanistan or Iraq, in which good men die to pay for the failures of bad men, cannot cover up the fact that our leaders have already surrendered control of this country to foreigners without a fight.

There’s no remorse, but Biggs should still go free

Ronald Biggs should be released. I know about the sad fate of Jack Mills.

I know that Biggs has shown no remorse. But since he came back from Brazil, he has served eight years, which is about what you get for homicide these days.

He’s only being kept in so Jack Straw can look tough, when he’s actually not.

Keeping Biggs in prison won’t protect a single pensioner from being mugged, make our streets more orderly or even stop future train robberies.

Men in the niqab? Why not?

It’s usually rather hard to speak to Muslim women in face veils.

You get the impression that they regard contact with you as in some way undesirable, and even upsetting.

But last week, I took part in a BBC programme in which one such woman, in full niqab, agreed to speak.

The presenter, Nicky Campbell, asked her a devastating question. If it was good for women to hide their faces, why wasn’t it equally good for men to do so?

For a full 30 seconds, she could not think of anything at all to say. I’ve seldom seen a more eloquent silence.

• So much for ‘Human Rights’. John Kelly has tried for years to get the BBC to listen to his justified complaints about its blatant pro-EU bias. He has got nowhere, so he has – wrongly in my view, since I believe in the rule of law – stopped paying his licence fee. Oddly, the TV licence people have done nothing about this for years – but they have now suddenly summoned him to court for non-payment. And there is nothing he can do. There is no option for jury trial, where he might hope for a symbolic acquittal. He cannot plead that the BBC fails to fulfil the terms of its Charter, as it does. He must either pay up, or be fined, or go to prison. He has checked with Human Rights experts, who tell him he has no case. Such a pity. I long to see the BBC in court, explaining its persistent partiality and forced for once to answer the questions it now airily evades.

• Once more the minimal cost of the Royal Family is up for debate, only it’s all one way, with a snide anti-monarchist undercurrent. Unable to fault Her Majesty, who is frugal and modest, critics seize on the petty extravagances of minor Royals. None of these adds up to a tiny part of the greed and extravagance of ‘democratic’ politicians, with their fleets of chauffeured cars and their pointless flying to silly conferences in pleasant foreign cities. A republic would be far more costly than a monarchy (just look at Air Force One). When will we in this country learn to stop spitting on our good luck and to keep the precious possessions our wiser parents handed on to us?